Religious and family groups have vowed to go to the electoral barricades in Queensland over what they are calling legislative child abuse - laws allowing gay and single people to use surrogate mothers.

The laws were passed in the State Parliament on Thursday night after almost 20 hours of bitter, divisive and emotional debate, with the major parties accusing each other of social engineering.

The legislation takes Queensland surrogacy laws from the most conservative - it was the only state to criminalise the practice - to some of the most liberal in Australia.

Dr David van Gend from the Family Council of Queensland says the Government sneaked its plan onto the legislative agenda at Christmas.

"We have told the Labor Party that this is something for which family groups will go to the barricades," he said.

"This is an assault on the deepest relationship between a mother and child. It is to trample on the rights of a child to have at least a chance of a mum and a dad in its life and not just have one bloke or two blokes or a single woman as its parents.

"And so on this we will be targeting every marginal seat in Queensland at the next state election which voted for this hideous bill."

Dr van Gend believes the group has enough support to picket Queensland's marginal seats.

He says with enough discussion, the issue has the potential to be a vote changer.

"People have no idea the cultural implications of the state decreeing that a man and another man - or just a man on his own - is identical in law to a mother and father from a child's perspective," he said.

"We know from a Galaxy Poll only a month or two back that 87 per cent of Australians consider that yes, a child should have a mother and a father to be brought up with, where ever possible.

"This bill was snuck through without public awareness. It was tabled just before Christmas on the last day of sittings and it was debated and voted on the second day of the new year and hardly anyone knew it was happening."

Equal rights

Gay and lesbian groups say they expect the passing of the laws will smooth the way for more legislation giving equal rights to same sex couples.

The Queensland Association for Healthy Communities' Paul Martin says some of the views expressed in Parliament by the Liberal National Party (LNP) were well out of step with community sentiment.

"There were some comments that children [brought] into the world through surrogacy would be viewed as pets or possessions or those types of things," he said.

"I've never heard anybody in the real world consider children in that way and certainly not people who have gone through a very long journey often to get to the surrogacy position.

"I think that was unnecessary. The talk about parents not being able to take children to the toilet because of their gender was also strange as well."

He says while the arguments made by the LNP against surrogacy for same-sex partners were respectfully made, they remain essentially homophobic.

"Our position is that if you don't believe in equality then yes, that is homophobic," he said.

"But many people in the debate, particularly from the LNP side, were saying that they're not homophobic, but also they don't believe that gay and lesbian parents should be able to access the surrogacy arrangements."

He says the passing of the legislation does show a political coming of age in Queensland.

"Certainly recognising the diversity of the communities that we have here in Queensland, tidying up some of the old-fashioned views and injustices in the old Queensland of 20 years or more - doing those things certainly continues to bring Queensland into the 21st century," he said.